Moravia - People

People

See also: List of people from Moravia

The Moravians are a Slavic ethnic group who speak various dialects of Czech. Before the expulsion of Germans from Moravia the Moravian German minority also referred to themselves as "Moravians" (Mährer) and the German expellees continue to do so to this day. Some Moravians assert that Moravian is a language distinct from Czech, however, their efforts are not widely supported by academics and the public. Some Moravians regard themselves as an ethnically distinct group; the majority consider themselves to be ethnically Czech. In the census of 1991 (first census in history in which respondents claimed to have Moravian nationality), 1,362,000 (13.2%) of the Czech population described themselves as being of Moravian nationality. In the census of 2001, this number had decreased to 380,000 (3.7% of the population). In the census of 2011, this number again rose, this time to 630,897 (6% of the Czech population).

Moravia historically had a huge minority of ethnic Germans, although they were largely expelled after World War II.

Notable people from Moravia include:

  • Mathias Franz Graf von Chorinsky Freiherr von Ledske (1720–1786), founder and first bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brno
  • Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), father of psychoanalysis
  • Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), father of genetics
  • Ernst Mach (1838–1916), physicist and philosopher
  • Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), theoretical mathematician
  • Oskar Schindler (1908–1974), entrepreneur, saviour of almost 1,200 Jews during the WWII
  • Milan Kundera (1929–), writer
  • Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), composer
  • Alfons Mucha (1860–1939), painter
  • Jan Ámos Komenský (Comenius) (1592–1670), educator and theologian, last bishop of Unity of the Brethren
  • Anton Pilgram (1450–1516), architect, sculptor and woodcarver
  • David Zeisberger (1717-1807) Moravian missionary to the Leni Lenape, "Apostle to the Indians"
  • Georgius Prochaska (1749–1820), ophthalmologist and physiologist
  • Adolf Loos (1870–1933), architect
  • František Palacký (1798–1876), historian and politician, "The Father of the Czech nation"
  • Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), philosopher and politician, first president of Czechoslovakia
  • Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), philosopher
  • Jan "Eskymo" Welzl (1868–1948), globetrotter and gold-digger, chief of the Siberian Eskimos
  • Karl Renner (1870–1950), politician, co-founder of Friends of Nature movement
  • Tomáš Baťa (1876–1932), entrepreneur, founder of Bata Shoes company
  • Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), economist and political scientist
  • Thomas J. Bata (1914-2008), entrepreneur, son of Tomáš Baťa and former head of the Bata shoe company
  • Ludvík Svoboda (1895–1979), general of I Czechoslovak Army Corps, seventh president of Czechoslovakia
  • George Placzek (1905–1955), physicist, participant in Manhattan Project
  • Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997), writer
  • Jan Skácel (1922–1989), poet
  • Peter Sís (1949–), illustrator, animator and writer
  • Magdalena Kožená (1973–), mezzo-soprano

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